Text Size

-

+

reset

Wendy Davis leads filibuster

Perry vows abortion ban

The RNC hasn’t latched onto the fight. Few national Republicans have weighed in. And a key party official in Texas acknowledged there’s no behind-the-scenes help coming, though he says he doesn’t need it.

Republicans will talk about the abortion bill when they’re asked about it, but they aren’t swooping into the fight with the same enthusiasm as liberals.

The mismatch makes sense: Even abortion bills that poll well, like the one in Texas does, open the door to the kinds of comments that have hurt national Republicans repeatedly — from Rep. Trent Franks’s comments last month on the “very low” number of rape-related pregnancies to Todd Akin blowing his shot at a Senate seat over his “legitimate rape” remarks in 2012.

But that political calculus doesn’t do much for anti-abortion activists who are glad to see their issue front and center.

“You either fight and ask your leaders to fight on an issue that cuts your way or you just fold up and go home, which is what the national party wants to do,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List. “It really is fear. It really is simply, ‘We’re not going to go there.’”

“Now, you’ve got an issue that’s in your platform, that cuts your way with big margins. To be silent is a mistake,” Dannenfelser said.

In contrast, Democrats couldn’t be happier with the way the issue is energizing their supporters.

Jeremy Bird, the former national field director for President Obama’s reelection campaign who now runs Battleground Texas, a group that’s trying to make Democrats more competitive in the state, says the abortion showdown inspired about 500 volunteers to knock on doors registering voters this weekend.

“Most people don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I want to register voters in the 100-degree heat,” Bird told POLITICO.

The political reality is that abortion is a dangerous debate to have on the national stage, even for a short period of time — as Franks found out when his comments on the “very low” number of rape-related pregnancies blew his chance to lead the debate on the House-passed ban on abortion after 20 weeks.

And that was a one-day debate in the House. The Texas Legislature is about to spend the better part of 30 days on it. That’s a lot of time for someone to trip on their shoelaces.

Perry’s decision to call a special session to pass the bill — which would ban abortions after 20 weeks and impose strict new rules on abortion clinics — carries the risk of political missteps for every day the Legislature spends on it. Perry has already made some people on his own side cringe with his remarks last week suggesting Davis was lucky she wasn’t aborted.

It’s not that Republicans are afraid the public won’t support the Texas bill. They know the polling is solidly on their side: Most Americans favor some restrictions on abortions, and a Gallup poll earlier this year found that their support for legal abortions drops dramatically after the first trimester.

There’s also the National Journal poll that found 48 percent of Americans would support a ban on abortions after 20 weeks. And the Texas bill, specifically, gets high levels of support, at least among the state’s voters: a Texas Tribune poll found that 62 percent of the state’s voters would support eliminating abortions after 20 weeks.

Those polls don’t measure public support for all of the implications of the Texas bill — particularly the new health standards that, according to its critics, could force all but five of the state’s abortion clinics to close.

But taken together, the polls give Republicans a reasonable amount of confidence that the Texas abortion debate won’t alienate huge blocs of voters.

“I don’t know how you get in trouble politically for taking a position that a majority of Americans favors,” Texas Republican Party Chairman Steve Munisteri told POLITICO.

GOP pollster Whit Ayres said he’d be “happy to have a debate on an 80 percent issue when the 80 percent is on your side” — referring to the eight out of 10 people in the Gallup poll who said abortions should be illegal in the third trimester.

But there’s a difference between having the public on your side on an issue and having them think it’s important. Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport noted that abortion is never one of the top priorities Americans list when the polling organization conducts its regular surveys of national priorities. In the May survey, he said, the top priorities for Americans were jobs, the economy and a more efficient government.